Lecturer in Fine Art & History of Art, Department of Art (Studio Practice), Director of Critical Studies, BA Fine Art Extension
s.seita (@gold.ac.uk)
Sophie Seita works with language as a material across performance, video, sound, textiles, books, and installations.
Sophie Seita is a London-based artist and researcher whose practice is grounded in language and performance but swerves voraciously into other mediums, such as sound, video, textiles, drawing, and installation. Her work has been commissioned, supported, performed, and published internationally, by Akademie der Künste (Berlin); Ruta del Castor (Mexico City); the Roberts Institute of Art and Hunterian Museum Glasgow; Nottingham Contemporary; Grand Union (Birmingham); Mimosa House; Ma Bibliothèque; Queer Art Projects; Canada Council for the Arts; British Council; UP Projects; Literarisches Colloquium Berlin; Kunsthalle Darmstadt; JNU (New Delhi); the 87 Press; and others. Often working with others across disciplines, she’s expanding and deepening her ongoing intersectional queer collaboration with the musician and conductor Naomi Woo, to give voice to untold or speculative archives and research queer ecology, as part of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions.
I teach on the BA Fine Art & Art History in Studio Practice and on the BA Fine Art Extension Degree in Critical Studies; and supervise and examine projects on the PhD programme.
Experimental pedagogy is at the heart of my work at Goldsmiths—my research and artistic practice develop out of and feed into it.
Research Interests:
• Lecture-performances, poetic essays, video essays, and practice-based research
• Queer studies, trans studies, affect theory
• Disability studies, deaf studies, creative access; experimental captions and audio descriptions as new performative and poetic genres
• Speculative approaches to archives and history-writing; fictional collectives
• Concepts of play, difficulty, opacity, absurdity, ornamentation, deep listening
• Histories of experimentation and avant-garde group formation in visual art, poetry, performance, and independent publishing
• Theories and practices of translation and multilingualism across literatures, cultures, and borders
• Environmental research through community co-creation; queer and decolonial ecology
Creative curiosities:
opacity, playfulness, difficulty, artifice, queer abstraction, weird things, small things, minor genres, but also ornamentation, the decorative, the baroque, the exuberant, language bubbling over, mud, muddiness, swimming in it (in language, in language as excess), tactility, materiality beyond objects, the materiality of language, listening, listening beyond 'hearing', listening with the body, things falling in and out of place, being confused, being surprised, leaning into or revelling in ambiguity, ambivalence, silliness, when things or practices are joyously not-making-sense, non-linear narratives, provisional ideas, finding the complex in the simple and vice versa, archives (historical/material and imagined/immaterial), the allegorical body, the conceptual body
Seita, Sophie. 2024. Too good to be entirely true (A coda on the pleasure of archives and avant-garde publishing). Textual Practice, 38(6), pp. 1012-1017. ISSN 0950-236X
Seita, Sophie. 2023. 'A Laboratory of Sensations': Listening for Texture. OEI: Aural Poetics, 98-99, pp. 125-139. ISSN 1404-5095
Seita, Sophie. 2022. Playing with Knowledge: On Lecture Performances. TDR/The Drama Review, 66(3), pp. 78-95. ISSN 1054-2043
Seita, Sophie. 2023. Lessons of Decal. London: the87press. ISBN 9781739393908
Seita, Sophie. 2019. Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN 9781503608719
Seita, Sophie and Clayton, Kate. 2023. Pearl & Theory Make Compost (2020). In: , ed. EMERGENCY INDEX: AN ANNUAL DOCUMENT OF PERFORMANCE PRACTICE, VOL. 10. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling Presse. ISBN 9781946604101
Seita, Sophie and Seda, Ergul. 2023. 'Listening to the Environment, from a Queer Perspective'. In: October Digbeth First Friday. Grand Union, Birmingham, United Kingdom 6 October 2023.
Seita, Sophie and Ort-Dinoor, Yael, eds. 2022. The Minutes, The Minutes of The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions, 1 + 2.
Seita, Sophie. 2023. Swimming in the Muddy Waters of Language (A Score for Verbs). In: "Mud: The Urgency of the Arts", Royal College of Art, United Kingdom, 30 March 2023.
Seita, Sophie. 2022. Reading the Rock. In: "Reading the Rock", Hoxton253, United Kingdom, 26 February 2022.
Seita, Sophie and Woo, Naomi. 2019. Beethoven Was a Lesbian. In: "Beethoven Was a Lesbian", Café Oto, United Kingdom, 2019-2023.
Seita, Sophie. 2024. Artist in Residence at Brown University.
Seita, Sophie. 2023. "A Score for Verbs (Unpacking my Performance Library)".
Seita, Sophie. Werner Düttmann Fellowship at Akademie der Künste Berlin.
Seita, Sophie. 2016-2019 MY LITTLE ENLIGHTENMENT PLAYS.
Seita, Sophie. 2020 – ongoing The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions.
Seita, Sophie. 2023. Cloudiness. In: "Crossing Borders", Millbank Tower, London, United Kingdom, 2 - 5 November 2023.
Seita, Sophie and Woo, Naomi. 2023. bingenTV. In: "bingenTV", Mimosa House, United Kingdom, 27 October – 8 December 2023.
Seita, Sophie. 2023. withwithwith. In: "Pretty Doomed", Ugly Duck, London, United Kingdom, 12 - 15 October 2023.
Seita, Sophie; Ergul, Seda and Yount, Reylon. 2023. Listening Session: Seeing Through Flames: Hildegard’s Musical Garden. Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham.